Critics have scorned Agatha Christie for more than a half century — no one more famously than Edmund Wilson, who alluded to the title of one of her best-known mysteries in his 1945 essay in The New Yorker, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”

Tomorrow One-Minute Book Reviews will have a modest defense of Agatha Christie www.agathachristie.com and a reconsideration of her Murder in Mesopotamia, about an archaeological dig near Baghdad that captures the interest of the detective Hercule Poirot.